quote:Also, what counts as a hostile climate in the first place? If a few hundred, or even a few thousand, people harass someone, that's bad. But if they're some fractional percentage point of an overall group (e.g. people who play games)then it's important to have some perspective.
The thing is, when you look at the overall numbers we're dealing with here it's important to have that perspective both ways. If only .01% of people are shouting at you, but that .01% equals a few thousand people, that's a lot of shouting. And if most of the rest are staying silent, the climate you are working in is thousands of people shouting at you. It doesn't really matter that those thousands are a small number of the overall gamers, they're still the ones making up your climate.
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How many people send death threats to Extra Credits for saying basically the same thing, but delivered by a male voice with undisputable video game cred?
I smell a double standard
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Since a majority of gamers are men who played it when it was their primary hobby and the trend towards wider inclusiveness is a recent one I have no doubt that the harassment of Anita is not only real, uncalled for, and ridiculous.
I also never seen her videos, I tend to prefer to watch Jim Sterling for my video game social news stuff, I don't even think I need to see her arguments to get 'both sides of the story', pretty sure gaming as a community needs to be the one with the burden of proof. Pretty sure the history is there.
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Even if you agree with Ms. Sarkeesian, you'd do well to watch one of her videos. If nothing else, so you know what kind of critic she is, and how her arguments are presented.
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She uses the word "tropes" unironically, I think that's a point in her favour already!
e: Looking at the first video there her presentation and content seem fine but actually is kind of what I would get if I merged tvtropes and tumblr together; educational with a feminist viewpoint which I'm sure is useful if and when I need it as reference for my own games but isn't really my sort of thing in terms of "Must Watch Every Week Without Failure", ala Jimquisition, Extra Credits, Zero Punctuation and sometimes MovieBob.
She speaks in a matter-of-factly presentation style that's informative but not really entertaining and that's usually what I would like to look for in my youtube 'grmejrnalizm' viewing.
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I'm not trying to persuade you to "like" Anita's style, only so when people say she's a frothing crazy lady who hates video games and video gamers, or that her arguments lack substance, you now know that is absolutely not the case. And you can make convincing counter-arguments to that effect.
It's totally fine you don't prefer her format. Thank you for watching one of her videos. Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Also, what counts as a hostile climate in the first place? If a few hundred, or even a few thousand, people harass someone, that's bad. But if they're some fractional percentage point of an overall group (e.g. people who play games)then it's important to have some perspective.
The thing is, when you look at the overall numbers we're dealing with here it's important to have that perspective both ways. If only .01% of people are shouting at you, but that .01% equals a few thousand people, that's a lot of shouting. And if most of the rest are staying silent, the climate you are working in is thousands of people shouting at you. It doesn't really matter that those thousands are a small number of the overall gamers, they're still the ones making up your climate.
Yeah, I think that would be totally true. I disagree with some of the premises though.
In particular, I think I question the "most of the rest" staying silent part.
Now, I'd agree that most gamers are silent. I suspect most gamers aren't actually paying any attention to this issue at all. Same way I bet most gamers don't actually read a lot of game articles. There are hundreds of millions of gamers. How many readers/followers/etc. do any of the groups involved in the Sarkeesian back and forth actually have?
So I think it's a bit unfair to use the silence of the majority of gamers as any sort of statement. They're gamers because they play games, not because they're active in game development, game critiques, or the surrounding media. I think it's a relatively small group of gamers that are interested in that kind of thing.
Now, that aside, let's focus on that group. The ones that are interested in this stuff. My impression of your statement above is that you think most people that are paying attention are either harassing Sarkeesian or standing by and letting her be harassed. But that's not my take at all. It seems like the majority of articles and comments are extremely pro-Sarkeesian. The people harassing her seem to be a minority, not just of gamers as a whole, but of the subset of gamers that follow this sort of thing.
This is just my impression. I haven't studied the issue in detail. So if there's some data out there comparing the number of anti-Sarkeesian articles to pro-Sarkeesian articles, or anti tweets to pro tweets, or whatever, I'd love to see it. Otherwise I think we're both just gonna be drawing our conclusions based on the stuff we've self-selected to be exposed to.
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Dan: A phenomenon I've noticed (in all circles, not particularly feminist ones) is the tendency to focus on negative responses disproportionately, or even frame a large number of negative but civil responses as being vicious and hostile when only a handful (or sometimes even no) responses of that nature exist. Aros and Herbley are good examples of people who do this on this very forum, and I can't tell you how many times someone has posted "he/she/I was savagely attacked for his/her/my views", only to go look at comments and read responses and find no such attacks, but simply polite disagreement. If you read the article Clive/Sa'eed/whoever posted in the other thread, it has a guy complaining about how he got "viciously attacked" by feminists in the comments section, only to actually read it and see that it's mostly polite discussion.
Which isn't to say that's what happened here, or that Anita hasn't gotten all sorts of awful threats. And I'm not trying to downplay or justify that either. Just that it's entirely possible the vast majority of the responses have been civil and decent... and ignored.
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quote:So I think it's a bit unfair to use the silence of the majority of gamers as any sort of statement
I don't disagree, but I would say most gamers are silently absorbing the programming. Of course they are also being programmed from numerous other sources, but I think the state of the medium is such that there is a very strong misogynistic thread that permeates it.
I don't believe video games force people to become chauvinistic, but if chauvinism or mysogyny is a behavior you can put on a spectrum, I would say it's impossible to argue that video games are even neutral in how they portray relationships between the sexes.
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Do you think games are really that much more misogynistic than other sorts of media? There are lots of misogynistic movies.
I'm not sure there's much reason to think that male gamers are more misogynistic than men generally. The main reasons to think so come from anecdotes like the one with Tom's friend. I suspect that what's going on is more that cons create an environment where women are likely to be seen as curious outliers, which in my experience makes men behave more misogynistically and probably makes it easier for woment to perceive them that way as well. I know that at my local game store, it's normal for the guys to be like "Dude, a HOT GIRL just came in!" whenever a girl shows up, which isn't normally how these particular guys would behave in a gender-balanced setting. Not that they are perfect specimens, but they're pretty average dudes IMO.
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So again, as Dan was suggesting, the main difference may be between people who aren't super serious members of the fan community, and those who are.
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The difference, Destineer, is that other media like film and television are enjoyed pretty much equally by men and women, which leads to the creation of media enjoyed by both men and women. Its certainly not perfect, but there's at least recognition of the fact that women pay to watch movies.
The console video game industry, conversely, has far less of a reach in the female market. Arguments that women just inherently don't like video games are pretty dumb, because after all there are quite a lot of women who create a fairly strong minority of the gaming market. The industry is not actually that great about encouraging women to play video games, partly due to the highly male-centric storytelling techniques that he to be used, and partly due to some truly misogynistic tendencies by both the industry (booth babes, etc) and the communities that the industry creates (harassment in online games and game forums).
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: Do you think games are really that much more misogynistic than other sorts of media? There are lots of misogynistic movies.
Sure, so let's solve both problems? We don't have to give video games a pass for now and then once film/TV is fixed, return to the issue.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: Do you think games are really that much more misogynistic than other sorts of media?
1. yes
2. but I find this to in large part be a product of the adolescence of the media format.
3. however, there is a difficult to ignore element of production that is interlaced into that. game production as an industry is notoriously heavily sexist and most of the girls i worked with left because it was a pretty shit environment for them. the people most often at the top of the heap in dev circles or otherwise ingratiated into the industry are, well, we'll call it, "not sufficiently self-motivated to address their own problematic behavior or views towards women" and the industry suffers for it and needs to call out when these people are pathologically reliant on tropes like what Sarkeesian is providing an ample description of
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quote:Originally posted by sarcasticmuppet: The difference, Destineer, is that other media like film and television are enjoyed pretty much equally by men and women, which leads to the creation of media enjoyed by both men and women. Its certainly not perfect, but there's at least recognition of the fact that women pay to watch movies.
The console video game industry, conversely, has far less of a reach in the female market. Arguments that women just inherently don't like video games are pretty dumb, because after all there are quite a lot of women who create a fairly strong minority of the gaming market. The industry is not actually that great about encouraging women to play video games, partly due to the highly male-centric storytelling techniques that he to be used, and partly due to some truly misogynistic tendencies by both the industry (booth babes, etc) and the communities that the industry creates (harassment in online games and game forums).
Oh, I think it's reasonably clear both that games are marketed to men and that women are socialized by the broader culture to see games as "not for them." So while I think the game industry could attract a few more women by marketing to them, I have very little confidence that it could attract equal numbers of men and women unless the broader culture were to change too.
quote:Sure, so let's solve both problems? We don't have to give video games a pass for now and then once film/TV is fixed, return to the issue.
Absolutely. I think were you and I disagree is that I don't see the problematic gender subtext of good films and games like Django Unchained and Bioshock as a problem that needs solving. But I would definitely like to see less problematic stuff of the sort that appears in Grand Theft Auto, or the episode of Game of Thrones I was criticizing earlier. Stuff that undermines the quality of the art.
I was just pointing out, though, the fact that the games themselves have this misogynistic aspect isn't really a reason to think gamers will be worse than your average dude.
quote:1. yes
2. but I find this to in large part be a product of the adolescence of the media format.
That may very well be true. I play fewer games than I used to, mostly just strategy games and Bioware games, so I don't see a lot of the actual bad stuff myself.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: This is just my impression. I haven't studied the issue in detail. So if there's some data out there comparing the number of anti-Sarkeesian articles to pro-Sarkeesian articles, or anti tweets to pro tweets, or whatever, I'd love to see it. Otherwise I think we're both just gonna be drawing our conclusions based on the stuff we've self-selected to be exposed to.
I've actually done a twitter search on her handle to see if I can figure it out, and that's obviously not the right way to do it. The pro/con tweets are fairly balanced, depending on when you look... sometimes it seems like there is a streak of one or the other. But the search obviously doesn't show all the tweets that mention her... for one, there's not enough, and for two, there's tweets that I've seen in my timeline that mention her that aren't there. I don't know how twitter's search works, and if it only picks what it thinks are the top tweets or something. And, of course, she's actively reporting the abusive ones as abuse, so they're getting deleted and don't show up at all except the most recent ones.
Which means that there is no actual data driven way to figure it out.
But no, I don't think everyone else is silent. But I do think that the vocal minority, however large it is, is vocal enough that being a woman in gaming or game journalism can frequently feel like you're in a hostile environment. Another woman (Jenn Frank) just decided to "step back" from game writing after her op-ed in The Guardian brought out the trolls against her. It may have been a straw that broke the camel's back sort of thing, but she decided the abuse wasn't worth it anymore. People are trying to hack her phone, because she said it's sometimes hard to be a woman in the field. It's ludicrous.
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quote:That may very well be true. I play fewer games than I used to, mostly just strategy games and Bioware games, so I don't see a lot of the actual bad stuff myself.
Games have had comparatively little time to marinate and grow as a medium, and there aren't a lot of giants around yet with shoulders worth standing on. We've even just barely broken out of real juvenile territory for the craft of game-making. Compare to film at its own relative period of adolescence — by now, early movies of the era take a lot of specific obsession with cinema for most anyone to even really sit through because they're generally just tryingly primitive and usually hilariously dumb. Stuff that was hailed as revolutionary for the time comes off as crude and quaint to us, at best (see: Birth of a Nation). Most games are the same way, and it doesn't take long sitting through a Sarkeesian video to remember that most video game plot and writing is laughably dumb and juvenile in a way we almost consciously try to forget.
Gaming is ruled by remarkably shallow trope, because, like the early language of cinema, you have tech-limited or market-limited methods of conveyance — you regurgitate the basics and the Damsels just to keep eyes locked to spectacle.
Gaming doesn't even get a leg up from how new it is and how much more progressively this era is to when film was an early medium, because it's similarly saturated with, wait for it, ohh, wait for it, ~male privilege~! and the environment is a great thing for a woman to be driven out of. It's like being a civil engineer, a bunch of intending and unintending old boys clubs with both pedestaling and harassment for women producers and coders.
There were some days in which it was just utterly embarrassing to watch. I have never once had room to disagree with a single one of my woman coworkers when they dropped out of any of the studios I was part of. And these are the Idea People who write these stupid games.
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I have watched Sarkeesians videos, and my opinion remains the same.
Her example on Hitman is especially misleading. In her video, she states that the player is encouraged to perform violent acts on female characters in a strip club, and that the player really has no choice but to beat the women.
In fact, it is completely the opposite. The entire encounter can be bypassed simply by walking by the room, and if any violence is directed towards either of the female characters (or any innocent for that matter) The player is penalized by a lower score.
Maybe we should have a conversation on how men are just disposable characters in video games and are killed off at a higher percentage than women? Most women in violent games tend to last until the end, while male characters are used as "trash" mobs and enemies. Play a shooter and tell me how many enemies you kill are male, how many end bosses are male, etc. Males may be over represented in games, but often not in a positive light.
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I would ask for the same thing, Geraine, given your recollection of her thoughts on the Bechdel test.
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I went back and skipped through the most recent video, because I thought I remembered the strip club scene. The one I found starts at about 4:10 in the most recent video, Women as Background Decoration 2, and in the section she's talking about using woman's corpses to make a scene feel dark or gritty. There's a brief clip of Hitman: Absolution, and then it cuts to a strip club scene in Mafia II: Joe's Adventure where a gun battle takes place over the dead bodies of women in a strip club.
Now, I didn't watch the entire thing again, like I said I skimmed through looking for strip club scenes. So maybe I found the wrong one. But also maybe you weren't paying very close attention when you watched the video, Geraine?
ETA: She never even talks about the Hitman scene, it's just one of two set-up clips before the Mafia II clip, which she says the name of as well as the name being on screen for the entire clip.
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Here's a video addressing some of the claims about Sarkeesian's use of Hitman (and some other games as well. It's specifically directed at one of her critics and it's not all good, but he does have some interesting points. The guy in this video points out that the penalty for killing the strippers is pretty minor and can be eliminating by hiding their bodies. He also asks why it was necessary for them to be strippers rather than guards or various other types of people (sure, variety, you don't want to have to sneak past the same people all the time, but I think the variety argument is somewhat negated when it seems like every game has a strip club or a brothel or some similar seedy place for color).
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Germaine, the lack of good representations of women in games is something we have literally been discussing for this entire thread. I'd love to see more women soldiers, women crime bosses, and women villians, as well as women heroes. Patriarchy and violent machismo in media harm men as well as women, which PS is a common statement made in any kind of serious feminist critiques including Sarkeesian's. I'd love for a game character's gender to simply not matter, for it to more-or-less reflect the reality of the roughly 50/50 split of humanity and the varied experiences and occupations of real people.
Is this somehow not what you were arguing for?
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I would ask for the same thing, Geraine, given your recollection of her thoughts on the Bechdel test.
You basically have to get sources from Geraine pretty much every time. His presentation of specific facts or ideas is flawed, I think, the majority of the time.
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Sarcastic Muppet - I'm playing a downloadable game on my PS4 right now called "Rogue Legacy" that I think would fit your criteria. Every time you die, one of your kids steps up and become the new hero and you play as them (so far I've played through 280 generations - an indication of how difficult the game is).
Males and Females are equally distributed and each character has 'traits' that affect their gameplay. A character with glaucoma makes the area around the character really blurry, but the rest of the world clear. One with nervous tics might not control correctly all of the time. One who is colorblind will play the game in monochrome.
But along with those 'traits' that affect gameplay, there are a few that do absolutely nothing. Being bald or being gay are two examples.
So one round you might be a dwarf lesbian warrior who is colorblind and the next you might be a tall and thin (when an enemy hits you it knocks you back further) spellcaster who has OCD.
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I would like to reiterate: it is hard. The graphics are intentionally old school and so is the gameplay.
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For my current Intro to Game Dev class my suggestion to my team of two girls and one brazillian dude was to make a TPS with the protagonists as an all female fighting unit.
I feel like I'm fighting the good fight. (Even if subconsciously its probably because I find strong, confident women to be generally more attractive than ultra feminine doormats but that's probably fine as long as I recognize that during my privilege check)
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Because an all girl fighting squad has never been done before.
It's not necessarily a good thing to create characters you are "attracted" to. You should create characters that are compelling and have a story to tell. Fan service is a thing after all, and it's kind of frustrating to deal with.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I would ask for the same thing, Geraine, given your recollection of her thoughts on the Bechdel test.
You basically have to get sources from Geraine pretty much every time. His presentation of specific facts or ideas is flawed, I think, the majority of the time.
Except it is in her videos, and I don't need to do your homework for you.
You can accuse me of flawed facts, but I've nothing to prove to you. It is there, you can find it yourself.
I agree about the spirit of the message, not the way she is going about it.
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quote: "Falsehoods about me are initially pushed by detractors who use them to post to 4Chan and Reddit to rally more people to the cause," Sarkeesian said. "It's bouncing from Twitter to Tumblr to Facebook to YouTube and back again. Once the cascade reaches a critical mass, it no longer matters what the facts are. It becomes a viral meme."
I've seen this happen first-hand - you can find many #gamergate types who claim I said gamers are worse than ISIS, even though I never said any such thing. It's the way an intentionally decontextualized and misrepresented statement gets bounced around and continuously distorted until it becomes fact. This isn't a web-only phenomenon, but Twitter certainly increases the speed at which truth mutates directly into lies.
As someone who's been called out twice in this very thread for misinterpreting or outright stating quotes that turned out to be false, I think a request for you to produce a time stamp is warranted. I even asked for one earlier.
quote: "I think it's fair to be called out on your s***," he said. "I think that it's a sad man that can never be self-reflective. I think that we tried to go and carry ourselves with respect, and try to respect sexuality and respect gender as much as we can, and sometimes we fail but hopefully we'll do better and continue to get better."
That man is all kinds of classy.
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: Because an all girl fighting squad has never been done before.
It's not necessarily a good thing to create characters you are "attracted" to. You should create characters that are compelling and have a story to tell. Fan service is a thing after all, and it's kind of frustrating to deal with.
I think you've missed the key context here.
It isn't to make them attractive, I am saying that the tropes that are generally considered positive in their portrayal of women are generally what I find appealing. Find me a girl dressed in complete combat uniform and that's something I'll find appealing.
What I'm saying is that I am recognizing that I'm not actually per se doing anything to advance a feminist cause or pov and probably more an accident that my tastes happen to align in such a way as to appear that they do. Though I content this is still probably preferable to the alternative.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I would ask for the same thing, Geraine, given your recollection of her thoughts on the Bechdel test.
You basically have to get sources from Geraine pretty much every time. His presentation of specific facts or ideas is flawed, I think, the majority of the time.
Except it is in her videos, and I don't need to do your homework for you.
You can accuse me of flawed facts, but I've nothing to prove to you. It is there, you can find it yourself.
Hey the bible says Geraine is a Juggalo. GO look it up i'm not doing your homework for you.
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Like I'm serious we're running on full on maybe the tenth time you have made a very specific claim about something that immediately raised suspicions that you were misrepresenting something or repeating a well-known falsehood.
Here is your claim, for the record:
quote:In her video, she states that the player is encouraged to perform violent acts on female characters in a strip club, and that the player really has no choice but to beat the women.
EMPHASIS on: that she states that the player really has no choice but to beat the women.
If you can't provide evidence for that particular claim, I am going to state straightforwardly that no such claim exists in any Sarkeesian video and that you are misrepresenting as usual, because you have a history for this.
(also, you gotta tell me man what's with the faygo i have never understood the fascination)
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quote:Originally posted by Elison R. Salazar: Find me a girl dressed in complete combat uniform and that's something I'll find appealing
I'm sure they'll be delighted.
Seriously, though, after a few days of patrols in 110+ degree heat and no showers to speak of, you may find their smell less than "appealing." (Not that they would care)
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quote:Originally posted by Elison R. Salazar: Find me a girl dressed in complete combat uniform and that's something I'll find appealing
I'm sure they'll be delighted.
Seriously, though, after a few days of patrols in 110+ degree heat and no showers to speak of, you may find their smell less than "appealing." (Not that they would care)
This is like the Glasses Girl cunundrum, of how do you kiss a glasses girl without her glasses getting in the way? Well you take off the glasses, but now you ask, isn't she no longer a glasses girl? WRONG! A glasses girl is always a glasses girl! And a soldier girl is always a soldier!
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Better yet, get to know people and don't think of them in terms of a stereotype that they happen to resemble. Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: Because an all girl fighting squad has never been done before.
It's not necessarily a good thing to create characters you are "attracted" to. You should create characters that are compelling and have a story to tell. Fan service is a thing after all, and it's kind of frustrating to deal with.
I think you've missed the key context here.
It isn't to make them attractive, I am saying that the tropes that are generally considered positive in their portrayal of women are generally what I find appealing. Find me a girl dressed in complete combat uniform and that's something I'll find appealing.
You said,
1: You recommended an all-girl fighting squad.
2: You are attracted to that concept.
That to me suggests that you recommend characters you are attracted to. There's nothing wrong with having characters you find enjoyable writing. Or even super teams where everybody is a hero. But you can't escape that part of the reason you want an all-girl justice squad is because you are sexually attracted to women, and particularly young looking militaristic types. Not trying to be critical of your preferences, I too personally like girls! But you have to internally review whether your characters exist to tell a compelling story and are complex people, or if they are a fantasy you want to see on paper.
quote: What I'm saying is that I am recognizing that I'm not actually per se doing anything to advance a feminist cause or pov and probably more an accident that my tastes happen to align in such a way as to appear that they do. Though I content this is still probably preferable to the alternative.
That's very introspective. But to be honest, an all-girl military squad can be just as anti-feminist as an all-girl brothel team.
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That would be hard to accomplish by accident however, that's the sort of thing that would only I think be true, if you set out to make the concept to in some way discredit the idea of it. Such as having a female fighting team that always failed because they're women. Otherwise simply just having the characters would act in of itself as a positive contribution.
[ September 17, 2014, 04:14 PM: Message edited by: Elison R. Salazar ]
Posts: 12931 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Elison R. Salazar: That would be hard to accomplish by accident however, that's the sort of thing that would only I think be true, if you set out to make the concept to in some way discredit the idea of it. Such as having a female fighting team that always failed because their women. Otherwise simply just having the characters would act in of itself as a positive contribution.
Not really. If the female soldiers are all representing some heavily objectified and shallow cartoon version of "woman", having all the fighters be women isn't really a positive from a feminist perspective.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Elison R. Salazar: That would be hard to accomplish by accident however, that's the sort of thing that would only I think be true, if you set out to make the concept to in some way discredit the idea of it. Such as having a female fighting team that always failed because their women. Otherwise simply just having the characters would act in of itself as a positive contribution.
Not really. If the female soldiers are all representing some heavily objectified and shallow cartoon version of "woman", having all the fighters be women isn't really a positive from a feminist perspective.
quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: That's very introspective. But to be honest, an all-girl military squad can be just as anti-feminist as an all-girl brothel team.
Could you elaborate on this?
Is this a statement that the worst portrayal of an all-girl military squad could be as bad as the worst all-girl brothel team? Is this a statement that the average portrayal of an all-girl military squad will be as bad as the average all-girl brothel team? What specific outcomes do you see coming out of the former team that would be just as bad as the outcomes from the latter team?
To be clear, I don't necessarily disagree. I just haven't formed an opinion on this yet.
Edit to add: Obviously, an objectified version of both would be worse than simply not objectifying women at all. That's trivial.
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Mucus: Take say Yoko from Gurren Lagann (An accomplished sniper/bounty hunter) and Inara from Firefly, and I think we could probably agree that the latter does more for feminism than the former.
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